The Madness of the Planets - Issue 8: Home
▻http://nautil.us/issue/8/home/the-madness-of-the-planets
I am a staunch believer in leading with the bad news, so let me get straight to the point. Earth, our anchor and our solitary haven in a hostile universe, is in a precarious situation. The solar system around us is rife with instability. Residents of Chelyabinsk, Russia, experienced this firsthand at 9:20 a.m. local time last Feb. 15, when a 50-foot-wide asteroid slammed into Earth’s atmosphere and exploded above the town, shattering windows, collapsing the roof of a local zinc factory, and sending more than a thousand people to the hospital with glass cuts and other injuries. Millions of people saw the videos of Comet ISON meeting a different but related cataclysmic fate as it took a swan dive past the sun on Thanksgiving Day. In the space of a few hours, the 4.5-billion-year-old (...)
